somewhere to talk about random ideas and projects like everyone else

stuff by antimatter15

Hi. I’m Kevin Kwok, and I’m currently a junior at MIT, and this is my obligatory online presence or whatever.

This is my little corner of the internet, where I talk about random projects and ideas and stuff.

If you want to contact me or read obnoxiously nostalgic autobiographical trivia, check out the about section.


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#evil empire

Generating the iOS 5 Linen texture with Canvas 19 August 2011

Screenshot
noise
I guess the linen texture which is way too prevalent in Lion and iOS 5 looked pretty cool so I tried replicating the effect in canvas. It’s not instant but the texture is generated fairly quickly. It’s all done in around 20 lines of code. The basic idea is to first create a bunch of semi-transparent noise such as the stuff on the right (Though in the real one the opacity is only 3% and in the one on the right it’s been increased to 70%). To do that, we createImageData and set every fourth pixel to 6 if Math.random() < 0.1. That means approximately 10% of the canvas will be semi-transparent with the rest being totally transparent. I’m not clever enough to embed some steganographic message in the ostensible noise pattern, because I’m just way too lazy for that sort of stuff. But if you think that that last sentence was actually a decoy for my master plan, feel free to waste time decoding a message which probably isn’t there.

After that, the canvas is converted to a DataURL so it can be loaded as an image. After loading the image, we iterate 40 times and call drawImage on the original canvas with an offset to make every single point into a cross-shape. Demo.

microwave on app store 23 August 2010

microwave app store

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microwave-google-wave-client/id386081118?mt=8

So microwave is now on the app store. Though wave was just announced to be shut down, I had the app done already (though I was waiting for a wave server update so thread continuation and attachment uploading would work), and I just published it anyway. So here it is. Grab it while wave still works :). It supports offline, so you can cache some waves and read them on-the-go.

μwave updates again 30 June 2010

microwave-screen630
microwave-screen630-wave

Edit mode is no longer experimental, a new implementation includes a tiny diff engine which allows editing a post without necessarily destroying layout. Root blip editing is now possible. There is a new tag list on the bottom of each wave, also including an “Add Tag” button. Search results are now formatted with modification date, number of blips, number of unread blips and read/unread state. There is a new settings panel when you click the logo. Added support for the internet exploder browser starting at version six. Owner_utils is a setting which adds utilities like “set everyone as read only”. The New Wave feature no longer creates pop-up prompts, but rather silently creates and opens an empty wave. It renders the live-editing cursors. There is a new multipane interface for desktop. Gadget support has greatly improved. It handles rotation on a mobile webkit device better. It now uses Wave Data/Robots Protocol 0.22 and renders using the newly exposed conversation model.

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